They passed a team of soldiers at the bottom, led by an officer Cruz recognized as Corporal Eddie Sullivan. The squad was assigned to guard against intruders and they were armed with gauss rifles. From the soldiers’ expressions, Cruz got the impression they wished to be on their way as soon as possible.
Corporal Sullivan also recognized Cruz and he stepped forward to greet her.
“Good evening, ma’am. Are you the last?”
“I don’t know, Corporal. Don’t you have a roster?”
“Lieutenant Griffin is in charge tonight. He went off a while ago and hasn’t come back.” Sullivan did his best to smile. “He’s taken the security handheld with him.”
It was no wonder Sullivan didn’t look happy. Without the security tablet, there was no way to be sure if anyone was still working on the Earth’s Fury. Even worse, there was no way to close up the ship without confirmation everyone was accounted for.
“Where’s the backup?” asked Cruz. “Who’s covering the Ulterior-2?”
“Lieutenant Griffin, ma’am.”
There was something shifty in the man’s responses, though Cruz couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was. “A single officer for both ships? There should be one assigned to each and a third as backup.”
“Not tonight.”
Cruz pointed at the visor perched up on top of Sullivan’s head.
“Can’t you get Lieutenant Griffin on the comms?”
“He’s probably on his way.”
Cruz knew the routine. In order to close up the Earth’s Fury, Lieutenant Griffin required both his security tablet and his personal authorisation codes. He couldn’t enter the latter remotely, so he would need to come back to the warship to seal it.
“Someone’s head will roll for this, Corporal. I’m sure you already guessed that.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Cruz and Dubose joined the rapidly-thinning crowd at the bottom of the airlifts. When their turn came, they piled inside along with fifteen or twenty others. The entrance doors were transparent and as the lift climbed, Cruz saw a few stragglers coming down the Earth’s Fury boarding ramp. The base-wide alert was doing an excellent job of highlighting a multitude of failures in this section alone.
Once they reached the surface, Cruz and Dubose looked for a vehicle to get them back to their designated muster points. The base was working a rotating shift, but this emergency had depleted the ranks of pool cars, leaving none remaining. Evacuating workers were meant to wait until their vehicle was full before driving off. In this case, it appeared that panic had set in, resulting in many cars being driven away only half loaded. It was a long run back to the main part of the Tucson facility and there were upwards of forty people left stranded.
In the artificial light, Cruz saw dozens of fleeing vehicles in the distance as they sped past the Ulterior-2’s construction trench.
“So much for discipline,” said Dubose.
There were four soldiers nearby, doing their best to keep everyone calm while they tried to arrange for transportation. A few of the technicians called out angrily, demanding answers the soldiers couldn’t provide.
“Listen up everyone!” shouted one of the R1Ts. “We’ve got a transport on its way with room for everyone and it’ll be here in a few minutes.”
“Why can’t we just go in yours?” asked one of the lead weapons technicians, pointing at the single vehicle nearby – it was a twelve-seat gravity truck designated specifically for the soldiers.
“It won’t fit everyone,” said the soldier. “The transport will be here soon.”
“How long is soon?” called out another technician. “I can’t see it coming.”
“I’ll check.”
The soldier lowered his visor, evidently meaning to speak to the driver on the comms. Cruz watched the soldier tap his fingertips against the side of his head. He lifted the visor again and spoke to one of his colleagues.
“Something’s wrong,” said Cruz.
“Like what?” asked Dubose.
“His comms.”
On a whim, Cruz pulled the diagnostic tablet from her pocket and took a look. It was still connected to the Earth’s Fury main comms array by short-range wireless and it didn’t take long to realise there were problems. She frowned and double-checked.
Dubose had her own tablet, but made no effort to look at it. “What can you see?” she asked.
“The comms aren’t sending or receiving,” Cruz replied. “I’ve just instructed the Earth’s Fury to contact the Tucson main comms hub and it’s failed. The spaceship hasn’t received a ping from the main hub for the last two minutes either.”
“You said Vraxar, didn’t you? Maybe you’re right,” said Dubose, making no effort to keep her voice low. She used a hand to shield her eyes and looked upwards, as though she’d seen an alien warship hovering over the base.
A few of the others overheard the words and they began muttering amongst themselves. Many of them squinted upwards in a search for hostile craft.
“We need to get away,” said one voice.
Soon there was a clamour of frightened men and women and the panic in their voices rose by the second. They were only technicians, given basic training and then assigned to non-combat roles. Nevertheless, their reactions angered Cruz.
This is the damned military, she thought. What the hell did they expect? A lifetime of peace?
She didn’t say the words. Instead, she tried a few different ways to connect with the Tucson comms hub. Unfortunately, the diagnostic tablet was only designed for testing a limited number of scenarios and she ran out of options quickly. She tapped the screen in frustration and the image wobbled threateningly.
“Don’t you dare,” she muttered.
The tablet’s screen stabilised, just as another thought came to her. She logged out of the Earth’s Fury comms and tried to connect to the Ulterior-2. For security purposes, the diagnostic tablets and personnel using them were usually locked to a single warship. Since she was due to start testing on the battleship, Cruz kept her fingers crossed that she’d been given approval to access the Ulterior-2’s arrays. The range was extreme and the link, when established, was tenuous.
“What’s going on here?” she asked herself.
Dubose had drifted away, no longer even pretending to be interested. Cruz didn’t spare her a second thought and she made a few tests of the Ulterior-2’s comms system. The results were inconclusive and before she could try again, her tablet’s link dropped out and then the tablet itself shut down. It was tempting to let it fall to the ground and stand on it. In the confusion it would be easy to claim it was an accident. The tablet survived and Cruz dropped it into the pocket in her uniform.
She located Dubose in the crowd and put a hand on the woman’s shoulder. Dubose turned, her expression distant and her mind clearly elsewhere.
“I’m going to the Ulterior-2,” said Cruz.
She wasn’t even sure if the other woman heard the words. If she did, she gave no acknowledgement. Cruz left her and ran for the Ulterior-2, setting off at a fast pace that would see her exhausted by the time she reached her destination. No one asked where she was going or told her to stop.
While she ran, Cruz reflected bitterly on how poorly the people on the Tucson base were reacting to the situation. If this was indeed the Vraxar, they’d find very little to stop them doing whatever it was they’d come to do. Cruz had no intention of meekly accepting her fate and she increased her pace, the rhythmic pounding of her feet loud in her ears.
The ES Ulterior-2 was even more impressive from close up than it was at a distance. Cruz descended in the airlift to the bottom of Trench One and emerged, gazing at the sheer walls of the battleship’s rear section. A few of the missile hatches were visible from here, as well as the aft underside particle beam. To her right, she could see one of the flank Havoc cannons – the barrel of the gun pointed towards the battleship’s nose and she briefly wondered if the weapons were online.
She h
urried onwards, until she was amongst the shadows beneath the hull. The vessel was supported by countless thick landing legs, each one strong enough to hold the largest skyscraper from any of the Confederation’s major cities. For a moment, she thought Lieutenant Todd Griffin had got here before her and closed up the spaceship. Then, she spotted one of the central ramps through the forest of support legs – it was a few hundred metres away and rested on the ground. To reach it, she was required to pass directly below another particle beam dome and she heard the humming of its overcharge power units.
There were soldiers here – six in total. They were jumpy and watched her approach with suspicion.
“Who’s in charge?” asked Cruz.
The squad leader identified herself. “I am. Corporal Jennie Baker, ma’am.”
“Lieutenant Cruz. No sign of Lieutenant Griffin?”
“No, ma’am. The comms went dead ten minutes ago and we don’t know what the hell is going on.”
There was the same evasiveness in Corporal Baker as Cruz had detected in the soldier earlier at the Earth’s Fury. She stared long and hard at Baker. Baker didn’t flinch.
“I’m going onboard the Ulterior-2.”
“There’s a full alert, Lieutenant. No one’s allowed back inside.”
“We’re under attack and this battleship has the only functioning comms array on the base.”
“Attack?”
“I am certain the Vraxar have come.”
Baker looked like she didn’t believe it, as if this was part of a big practical joke played by senior officers. For a moment, Cruz thought she was about to get an argument from a junior officer. In the end, Baker didn’t give a challenge.
“It’s all yours, Lieutenant. We think everyone already left, so you’ll be all alone.”
“Do you have a way of sealing the ship?”
Baker shook her head. “Only Lieutenant Griffin.”
“I might wring his neck when I see him,” said Cruz with feeling. “You’d be better off somewhere inside as well. I don’t have any idea what’s coming, but you can be sure it won’t be pleasant.”
“We’ll stay here for the moment, ma’am.”
Cruz didn’t waste time attempting persuasion. She jogged up the ramp, through the airlock room at the top and into the main personnel area of the battleship. Cruz hadn’t been on the Ulterior-2 before and she certainly hadn’t seen the design plans. Even so, her feet knew the way to the bridge and they guided her along wide corridors, through two open areas and onwards to a flight of steps which took her to the blast door protecting the bridge. To her relief, the door slid open when she pressed the access panel and allowed her into the room beyond.
The Ulterior-2’s bridge was a large, square area, with sixteen consoles arranged in clusters of four, each powered up and left in diagnostic mode. The captain and commander’s consoles were set apart and positioned at the front, directly before the main bulkhead screens.
Much of it looked new and unfamiliar. The consoles themselves were different in appearance to those on every other Space Corps warship – the first in a new generation of technology come too late to be fitted throughout the fleet.
It was eerily quiet, like a ghost ship from an unknown civilisation found drifting through space. When she concentrated, Cruz picked up the faintest of background humming noises, hardly detectable over the rushing of blood through her ears.
Shaking her head clear, Cruz approached the comms cluster and dropped into one of the seats. There was an additional screen with a menu of options that made little sense. The panel itself was arranged differently to anything she was used to and again, it had a variety of new options specific to the battleship’s sensor arrays.
It only took a minute for Cruz to realise the scale of the challenge before her, especially since the sensor arrays weren’t even fully powered up. It appeared Lead Technician Ashlea Dubose hadn’t been exaggerating when she mentioned how difficult it would be to complete testing in the thirty allotted hours. Cruz wasn’t easily put off and she got on with the task of figuring out firstly how to bring the sensors online and then to see what they were capable of.
Chapter Six
Lieutenant Eric McKinney flexed his right arm and suppressed a shiver. The underground room wasn’t cold as such, in spite of what was stored a few hundred metres below, and he was sure the tiny fragments of Obsidiar which powered his new heart and flesh-covered alloy arm were responsible for his recent susceptibility to the cold.
He rotated both forearms slowly, trying for the thousandth time to detect any difference between the two. The new one looked exactly the same as a normal arm, though at the moment his spacesuit covered the skin. He had no difficulty in concluding the surgeons had done an excellent job and there was no discernible difference. Except for this damn cold, he thought.
The far door opened and Sergeant Johnny Li walked in, back from his visit to the central admin building. He was wearing his suit as they all were, and with his visor on top of his head. There were a few others inside the guard room, but Li’s eyes found McKinney.
“Hey, Lieutenant! Any news?”
Li was usually upbeat and nothing seemed to get him down, not even a full-scale planetary alert and a Vraxar capital ship with a billion alien soldiers onboard.
“What do you think?” grunted McKinney. “Anyway, you’re the one who’s been outside.”
“You’ve got the knack, Lieutenant. If a mouse takes a crap in the armoury, you’re always the first to know.” Evidently dissatisfied with McKinney’s answer, Li’s eyes searched out his next target. “Corporal Bannerman, my friend!”
Corporal Nitro Bannerman was sitting at the lone, fixed metal table, with his comms pack in front of him. He didn’t look up and continued poking at the pack’s innards with a slender metal probe. “What can I do for you, Sergeant?”
Li used his gauss rifle to point. “The good lieutenant knows shit, so I thought maybe you’d have something for me. What’s happened while I’ve been away?”
“Same old same old. The comms are dead except for the hard links. I couldn’t even get a message to your visor from here. There’s not even static.”
“Any update to our orders, Sergeant?” asked McKinney. Li’s demeanour had given him the answer already.
“Keep doing what we’re doing, Lieutenant. There are some angry people out there. I hear Fleet Admiral Duggan himself has strangled a dozen people with his bare hands because they didn’t think to cover the base with hard links.”
The hard links reached across much of the Tucson base, but they didn’t extend as far out as the Obsidiar Storage Facility. This was one of the newest areas on the base and fitted with internal backup cables, but they hadn’t thought to link them to the main command and control. It was as though the pursuit of technology made the designers sneering of anything so old fashioned as physical cables.
“Yeah, right,” said Bannerman.
“What are you doing to that pack anyway?” asked Li, taking a greater interest. “That’s expensive military equipment and you’re sticking your nail file into it.”
Bannerman paused in his tinkering. “These packs are made to survive in all the same places as a soldier in a spacesuit and they’re meant to be field serviceable at a pinch. So I’m having a look to see if there’s anything I can change in order to get a signal in or out.”
Ricky Vega was lounging in one of the other chairs. “He’s pissing about, Sergeant, in the hope he gets a medal for solving the base comms problems before the Vraxar blow us to pieces from orbit.”
“There’ll be nothing left to pin a medal onto when those alien bastards are finished with this place,” said Martin Garcia. He lifted his rifle and looked along the smooth barrel. “Maybe they’ll show their faces and we’ll get to shoot a few.”
“That’s the spirit!” said Li. “And then when they turn you into a walking corpse you’ll have some good memories to keep you going during your thousand years of servitude.”
&
nbsp; “Maybe a few of us will get through this,” said Huey Roldan. “Just think of the prize - a chance to shoot Garcia the Vraxar in his face.”
“I’ll be aiming for his balls,” said Vega.
Jeb Whitlock joined in. “You’re not that good a shot.”
Garcia didn’t like the banter too much when he was on the receiving end. He swore and raised his middle finger to the others in the room, which only made them laugh more.
McKinney chuckled and picked up his rifle. “Play nicely while I’m gone.”
Li was the curious one. “Where are you off to, Lieutenant?”
“I only stopped by here for two minutes to make sure everyone knows what they’re doing.”
“Guarding the interior until it’s our turn on the wall or until the Vraxar do something,” said Vega.
Li addressed the others as if McKinney was already out of the room. “The man runs a tight ship.”
“Don’t you forget it, Sergeant.”
McKinney exited the guard room through one of the two doors. There was a passage outside, stark metal walls dull against the blue-white light cast from tiny globes in the ceiling. A ceiling mounted mini-gun whirred softly as it turned sluggishly towards the movement of McKinney’s stride. He did his best to ignore the nine barrels spinning softly in preparation to mow down anything the OSF defence computer didn’t like the look of. Whatever it was affecting the main base cluster, it was also making the independent systems here operate at a fraction of their usual speed.
The guard room door opened again. “Mind if I tag along?” asked Bannerman. “My eyes can’t take much more close-up work.”
“Sure, come and stretch your legs.”
The two of them set off. The Obsidiar Storage Facility was a fairly straightforward place to navigate. The above-ground part of the building was low, square and with thick walls of concrete-clad alloy. It was surrounded by two separate walls, each with wide gates, unsmiling guards and the kind of city-levelling multi-barrelled chainguns the Space Corps mounted on the latest generation of Colossus tanks.
Earth's Fury (Obsidiar Fleet Book 4) Page 6
